Rugby, Nails, and Verse

Poet Elyse Fenton ’03 was the winner of the 2010 Dylan Thomas prize, given annually to a writer under the age of 30. Photo by James Davies.

Working with her hands helped poet Elyse Fenton ’03 hone her craft.

By Dave Jarecki

Elyse
Fenton collects words, holds them in her mind like river stones, then stacks
them into poetic form with the same precision she employed those summers she spent
building trails in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. She orchestrates the
movement of words through reckless play with the adroitness she displayed as a
scrum half on Reed’s rugby team. Yet her work remains alight with tenderness,
awe, and love. Not just for the power of words but also, one feels, the literal
existence of words, how they look, read, and sound as well as the residue they leave behind on the lips.

“Once
upon a time I had a journal,” she laughs over the phone from Philadelphia,
where she lives with her husband Peenesh and their 14-month-old daughter Mira.
“I would write words in the journal, and I’d look things up. That process has
faded, but I’m still hungry for words.”

Not
only has Elyse stayed hungry for words, but she also remains loyal to the
notion that a single word can lead her into the guts of a poem. Her love for
language helps make reading Clamor,
her award winning debut poetry collection, such a delight.

The
collection has won a great deal of acclaim,
including the 2008 Pablo Neruda Prize for the poem “Infidelity,” the 2009
Cleveland State University first book prize, and most recently, the 2010
University of Wales Dylan Thomas prize, given annually to a writer under the
age of 30. Elyse was the first American and the first poet to win the award.

Most of the attention, from back-cover blurbs to international
interviews, dwells on the book’s subject material—a war bride channeling words
from the front delivered via text messages by her soldier husband. And while
many of the poems read like memoir, Elyse’s poetic grace and aptitude for
language allowed her to enter any number of worlds the words presented, thereby
embodying the experience in new ways. This willingness to follow the thread of
language—be it a sentence, phrase, or single word—is something Elyse has been
doing almost her entire life.

“Around
the time I was five or six,” she says, “I had the habit of saying everything
out loud, then repeating the words under my breath in a quiet whisper. I was
learning to read the sound and surfaces of language. Even then I wanted to
savor words.”

In
the poem, “Commerce,” which opens the book’s dream-like second section, she
engages the reader in her language play, hovering around the heteronyms wound
(“wownd”) and wound (“woond”). In “Word from the Front,” we
fall into the poem on the back of a corkscrew landing, a phrase that came her way across 7,000
miles.

“The
material of war demands that we navigate the language in different ways,” Elyse
says. “The way we speak of war can often feel clichéd and over-used. In order
to articulate things in a wilder, more accurate sense, it becomes necessary to
reach deeper into our poetic bag of tricks.”

Professor
Lisa Steinman
[English 1976–], who served as Elyse’s thesis adviser, and also worked with her
in a number of classes, isn’t surprised by her willingness to delve deep into
language, nor of her success.

“Elyse
arrived here as one of the most careful craftsmen of language I’d seen in an
undergrad,” Steinman says. “It made working with her a great pleasure.”
Steinman recalls how Elyse’s thesis, Hammer Struck Music, worked language in a similar way, with
the language in this case coming from the world of manual labor, something
Elyse knew about from working as a trail builder and carpentry apprentice.

“Her
thesis was very carefully crafted,” Steinman says. “As we read poems aloud, she
was always thinking about diction, syntax, clarity… even the etymology of
words.”

“I
was obsessed with various tellings of the John Henry song,” Elyse says of her thesis.
“The thesis includes a series of poems about John Henry and imagining John
Henry’s wife. A lot of that thinking, I believe, translated into the thinking,
or at least the pre-thinking,
for Clamor.”

Whether
describing the thoughts of John Henry’s wife, or grappling with the uncertainty
brought on by Peenesh’s deployment, Elyse’s poetic drive is fueled by her
desire to see how closely language can connect us to moments that are both
fragile and fleeting.

“In
Clamor, the material
is very much about language, which in itself is anchored by the potential for
failure. It’s a very elegiac notion – our attempts to articulate something are
hampered because we can’t actually get to the thing itself.”

Elyse
is well aware that the majority of the public interest and praise for Clamor
has to do with the
book’s portrait of a 21st century war bride floating kernels of
thought back and forth to her soldier husband via a handheld screen, then
dealing with the emotional aftermath of all that couldn’t be said and shared. Still,
she hopes that readers are able to move beyond the subject and sink into the
craft as well.

“It’s
amazing to have a readership come of this. I’m certainly thankful the book has
reached varying audiences, but it would be great if, in being attracted to the
material, readers take more time with the language.”

Winning the Dylan Thomas prize, along with its $47,000 bounty,
has been a great honor for Elyse, but hasn’t really changed the painstaking
process of writing for her. She remains committed to keeping her nose on the
page, her keen ear tuned to conversations and everyday language. She will
always be collecting words, holding them in her mind then stacking them into poetic
form, building trails through new terrain.

Elyse Fenton will read
from her work on Thursday, Mar 31, 6:30 PM at the Psychology Building
Auditorium 105 at Reed College, 3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard, Portland OR. The
reading is free and open to the public.